City election staff all of 2 full-timers

With all the talk the past couple of weeks about various problems with elections in Worcester, it should be pointed out that only two full-time employees work in the city’s Election Commission office.

That’s right, Worcester, the second largest city in New England, with nearly 100,000 registered voters, has only two full-time people — an assistant director of elections (Joshua D. Meduna) and an administrative assistant — in its elections office to support the five-member Election Commission.

That’s kind of mind-boggling when you consider the Election Commission’s significant responsibilities.

It stages and oversees elections in Worcester, is responsible for registering voters and informing them of their polling location, arranging for the city’s 50 polling locations and making sure they meet all accessibility regulations, and conducting the annual street listing, otherwise known as the city census.

It also is responsible for preparing nomination papers for candidates running for local office, certifying the signatures on those papers, designing the municipal ballot, responding to absentee ballot requests, and recruiting and training more than 300 people to work at the polls when elections are held.

Talking about running an operation on a shoe-string; it isn’t like the people in the Election Commission office just deal with elections and then sit around and twiddle their thumbs the rest of the year.

Not by a long shot.

Like all other municipal offices, the Election Commission office has been a victim of the budget ax over the years.

Staffing in the office reached a precariously low point when two mid-level positions were eliminated a few years ago, and then another staffer took early retirement.

For a while, it left Mr. Meduna as the only full-time employee in the Election Commission office.

To better meet the needs of the Election Commission, the city in 2007 placed its operations and responsibilities under the control of the city clerk. In effect, the City Clerk’s Department was split into two operations: the City Clerk Division and the Election Commission Division.

As part of that reorganization, City Clerk David J. Rushford was given the added responsibility of providing administrative and operational support to the Election Commission. That allowed him to assign personnel from the City Clerk Division to the Election Commission Division when required, especially during election seasons.

That worked well when the city clerk’s office had more staffing than it does now. In addition, the clerk’s office has also taken on the responsibility of staffing the City Council office when needed.

Mr. Rushford said that means he now has to cover three offices with a total of 12 employees, with one of those employees on long-term sick-leave and expected to be out for the balance of the year.

In comparison, he said, the city of Springfield, which has 30,000 fewer people and some 25,000 fewer registered voters than Worcester, has 19.5 full-time positions covering the same three offices.

Mr. Rushford said the Election Commission office needs at least four full-time employees to better meet its demands.

But because staffing has gotten so low in the city clerk’s office, he said he cannot simply move people from that office to the Election Commission during normal business hours.

Instead, he said he had to have employees in the City Clerk Division work overtime on nights and weekends to update the voter registration rolls for the Nov. 6 election. He said those people will also be needed to work overtime to process absentee ballot requests when they start coming in — about 4,000 requests are expected to be filed for this election.

“The demands on the two full-time staff people in the Election Commission office are indeed great,” he said. “I can no longer simply move people from the clerk’s office over to elections during the day. The time is long overdue for positions to be reinstituted in the Election Commission office. If we could at least get back the two mid-level positions that were lost a few years ago it would at least bring us back to where we used to be.”

Diane C. Mohieldin, chairman of the Election Commission, said a major concern she has is that the commission does not have another person in its office who has Mr. Meduna’s expertise in election matters.

“We have all our eggs in one basket right now,” she said. “We really rely on Josh Meduna and we are very dependent on people in the city clerk’s office. We need to get additional expertise in our office. It’s important for us as an organization to have adequate training of other full-time election staff in the future.”

At its meeting Thursday night, the Election Commission unanimously voted to ask City Manager Michael V. O’Brien to restore the two mid-level positions that were eliminated from the commission’s budget a few years ago.

That likely won’t happen in time for the November election and it remains to be seen if it happens at all.

That’s because Mr. O’Brien has been very cautious in restoring positions that have either been eliminated through budget cuts or became vacant through early retirements. You can bet that every other city department can make the same case as the Election Commission for the restoration of lost positions.

But now may be a good time for the Election Commission to make its bid for the two additional positions because it certainly has the city manager’s ear in the wake the controversy that erupted at some polling locations during the Sept. 6 state primary.

Mr. O’Brien has pledged to the commission whatever resources it needs for the November election, to make sure it runs smoothly and without any problems.

“There seems to be no hesitation on the part of the (city) administration to deliver to you what is requested,” Mr. Rushford told the Election Commission last week.